A counter-revolution is just as bad as the regular kind, and due to the fact that the CIA's records are mostly declassified, including the counter-coup in Chile. The KGB backed groups will normally fair better in the eyes of the world because the only way to get to KGB is to break into the Moscow Archives, which has an entire army division guarding it. good luck.

In most cases I think it is safe to say that a revolution is bad. Not all, but most.

Did you know the KGB had a pistol that was completely silent and made it appear that you had been shot at 400 meters?

The KGB is, and always will be shrouded in mystery, They launched revolutions and preformed assassinations on a unprecedented level. We will never know how many "popular" uprisings were orchastrated by KGB operatives.

And the CIA did differently? If anything the CIA and their friends were just as bad if not worse, they frequently toppled democratically elected governments, supressed democracy wherever they found it, defended US corporate interests at the expense of human rights and practiced a thousand other human rights violations.

Except now the old Soviet Union has collapsed, so things aren't quite so mysterious.

Everything you just said, the KGB did, more often than not to far greater extremes than the CIA. The CIA supported brutal, reactionary dictators who overthrew democratically elected governments for sure. So did the KGB and they were a lot more brutal when they did it.

We cannot say for certain just what the KGB got up to, but whatever it is it warrants an entire FSB detachment to safe guard it.

Lenin believed the ends justified the means. If only he had known what the end would be at the time.

You are ignorant if you think that the CIA overthrew reactionary dictators. Hell, they were the best friends a reactionary dictator could have. they sold weapons for years to Saddam Hussein in the hopes that he'd fight Iran. They overthrew the Iranian Government and put in the RADICAL Shah of Iran.

Lennin said that, yes. And I think that his government was a vast improvement over the Czarist system that preceded him.

No the word revolution means a turn around.Russia's revolutions rid it of an idiotic monarch and it along with the union republics became a world superpower in 30 years, China revolution rid the country of the corrupt Chiang Kai-shek governement and modernised much of china. Cuba rid itself of US hegemony and now has one of best health care and education systems in the world and it is up to by many south Americans.

I'm not going to say that they didn't have problems Revolution is never easy and no one has said it would be.

Revolution, Definition:a procedure or course, as if in a circuit, back to a starting point.

The Russian revolution replaced a corrupt and incompetent Monarchy, with a corrupt and incompetent Single party "Communist" state, which used the Czars modernization plans and then took all the credit for it.

China nearly destroyed itself under Mao's "guidance". Twice. Caused millions of deaths and later repressed much of the civilian populace.

Cuba's "economy", if you could call it that, is an absolute mess. Even without the US trade embargo, they are totally reliant on the Soviet Union, and later China for almost all of there GDP, aside from the tourism industry. They got rid of US hegemony and thats fantastic an I'm happy for them, all that happened was they were under Soviet control.

While we are debating the sucesses/failures of revolution, do you mind if I ask about where you stand on the overthrow of a democratically elected government?

"Czars modernization plans" what plans, it took a full scale uprising for Nicholas to set up a Duma that he could close down any time he chose, he had no more plans to modernization Russian then a tadpole.

Read history. Yes Maoist china had many problems, but those were nothing compared the destruction that happened because of European imperialism and the failings of the Qing Dynasty or during the warlord era, or the Second Sino-Japanese War

Cuba is a small island, it needs international trade, which the US will not allow, they were never under soviet control, the soviet union was the only country they could turn to after the bay of pigs.

The Czar (Alexander the II, The last great Czar. Nicholas just made a half hearted attempt at finishing what he started) began massive land reform (abolition of serfdom) in an attempt to set Russia on the path to modernization, He was the only thing that stopped the Russian monarchy from decaying any further, and bring Russia into the Modern age. He was remarkably successful right up to his assassination in 1881. Unfortunately for all of Russia his succesor was...less committed to reform than he had been and Russia's modernization crept along at a snails pace until Stalin decided that Alex had the right idea of things (at least industrially). Stalin may have been a bit too rushed in his industrialization though.

The Qing Dynasty was only the victim of European imperialism because they went out of their way to put the "inferior" Europeans in their place, Constantly harrasing British traders, often extracting extortion money in exchange for not horifically and violently tearing them to shreds. Eventually the British got fed up with this anti-European bias and China's backward practices and so decided they should, as good honest white folk, Teach the Chinese a lesson or two. They succeded.

Cuba was almost wholly dependent on Soviet support to continue existing, When the Soviets went MIA in '91 Cuba's GDP dropped by 35%. Much like North Korea they are almost entirely dependent on a benefactor to actually continue functioning as a soverign nation.

Abolition of serfdom did very little to help the Russian people, Alexander the II did it more to deal with the unrest born out of Russia's defeat in the Crimean war, the peasants were "free" but they were saddled with taxes which were used to pay the ex-serf owners (who retained ownership of most of the land anyway) this also mean the 70% of the the peasants didn't have enough land to feed there families.You talk all you like about the reforms of 19th centery russia but remember western sharholders owned 90% of russia's mines, 50% of it's chemical industry, over 40% of her engineering plants and 42% of her banking stock, the country was virtually a colony.the reforms were meaningless.

So the stupidity of the Qing Dynasty mean it was fine for the Europeans to wreak the country."good honest white folk" these are the same people who just a few years before tied people to cannons and then blew them up just a few years before, the Europeans were no better then the Chinese.

If Cuba was so dependent on the soviet union, why is the government still standing? By the way when every country you are working with stops trading what do you thinks is going to happen?if the countries we trade with stopped do you think our GDP would stay the same, I'm guessing no.